Is Your Life a Channel of Blessing?

I like the first two lines of the hymn Make Me a Channel of Blessing: “Is your life a channel of blessing? Is the love of God flowing through you?” I am convinced that this is the best way to see the way the Christian life works. You don’t’ work really hard to earn God’s love for you. You accept God’s love, it fills you, and then the love of God flows through you to other people. This image of love accepted and love flowing helps me to understand the story we call “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.”

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is also the Parable of the Unloving Older Brother. Jesus told this story mainly to help unloving people to see themselves in the older brother. Luke tells us that Jesus responded to Pharisees and scribes with this story when they saw that tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. Seeing the people they despised gathering around Jesus evoked a response from them that went like this: “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” If we sang the hymn’s question to them – “Is the love of God flowing through you?” – the obvious answer would be, “No.”

So Jesus told them what Luke calls “a story.” Actually, it is three stories that function as one. A lost sheep is found and there’s a celebration. A lost coin is found and there’s a celebration. A lost son that is found and there’s a celebration. The older son will not enter into the celebration for his brother who was lost and is found. Why? We limit our understanding of what is happening inside the older brother if we side with him when, acting like a victim, he tells his father, “You never gave me a party – after all I have done for you.” We also fail to understand what is happening if we make him the bad guy and just label him the mean and nasty older brother.

The reason the older brother cannot celebrate his brother’s return home is because he does not have love in him. He thinks he has earned his father’s love by working hard. Love that is earned is not real love. He can’t get love from his father that way. He has to accept his father’s love for no other reason than the father gives it, and he needs it. If he had love in him, it would be flowing through him, but he had never learned that the love of God is freely given and freely received. Then it flows out to others.

If you try to earn love you can’t have it, and it won’t flow. But if you will receive it, God the Father’s love will fill you and flow through you to other people. It won’t matter to you who they are. Your life will be “a channel of blessing.”

Love and Faithfulness No Matter What

Two writers have had a huge impact on my life in the last five years: Greg Baer and Henri Nouwen. They have both helped me to see that the purpose of life is to learn to love others, not to have everything going my way all the time.

Greg Baer teaches that most people believe that the purpose of life is to consistently enjoy comfort, convenience, pleasure, and fairness. He says that with this belief, situations such as sickness, disability, and poverty become intolerable. But the goals of life are not comfort and ease. The ultimate goal of life is to have joy and peace. We can only have genuine joy and peace as we share love with those around us. “When we believe that learning to love others is the greatest joy of life, we begin to see events that are painful and difficult in a different light.”

Henri Nouwen gives us a similar perspective on the purpose of our lives when he writes, “Many people live with the unconscious or conscious expectation that eventually things will get better; wars, hunger, poverty, oppression, and exploitation will vanish; and all people will live in harmony. Their lives and work are motivated by that expectation. When this does not happen in their lifetimes, they are often disillusioned and experience themselves as failures."

“But Jesus doesn't support such an optimistic outlook. He foresees not only the destruction of his beloved city Jerusalem but also a world full of cruelty, violence, and conflict. For Jesus there is no happy ending in this world. The challenge of Jesus is not to solve all the world's problems before the end of time but to remain faithful at any cost.”

These two teachers help me to appreciate people I know who are facing some of the toughest things life can throw at them and are still loving and faithful. They have given me a clear vision of what I want to do with my life. I want to learn to love others. I want to remain faithful no matter what happens.

Religious Freedom for All

As we commemorate the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on The World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11, we mourn the loss of the lives of innocent people. We pray for the end of religious fanaticism that generates the kind of hatred that was in the attackers. We thank God, as we know God in Jesus for our religious freedom in America. It is religious freedom for all.

We Baptists have a strong heritage of standing for religious freedom for all people. Our ancestors came out of the Church of England in the early 1600s when the English king, James I, thought he had the “divine right” to tell his subjects what their religion would be. John Smyth and Thomas Helwys stood firm for freedom as the first Baptists on English soil. They stood not just for their own freedom, but also for the freedom of all people to worship God as they choose.

Thomas Helwys, a Baptist pastor, wrote to King James, “For we do freely profess that our lord the king has no more power over their consciences [Roman Catholics] than over ours, and that is none at all. . . . For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. This is made evident to our lord the king by the scriptures.” By “Turks” Thomas Helwys was referring to the religious group we call Muslims.

In response to Helwys’ stand for the freedom of “Roman Catholics, . . . heretics, Muslims, Jews or whatsoever” King James put him in prison in London where he died.

Our founder of our Baptist heritage took a stand and died not for religious tolerance, but for religious freedom. Tolerance says, “Our religion is the dominant religion in control, but we will tolerate other religions, allowing them to have their place.” Religious freedom says, “There will be no dominance of one religion over another. ‘For men’s religion is between God and themselves.’” Thank God for the religious freedom of all in America.

God and Creator and Stephen Hawking

You may have heard that Stephen Hawking, the most respected theoretical physicist since Einstein, has written that he does not believe God created the universe. In his new book, The Grand Design, he says, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”

This has been high on my list of things to think about this week. It comes right under my thoughts about how I can keep crabgrass from taking over my lawn. I have to be honest: I don’t know what Hawking means when he says that the universe can create itself from nothing “because there is a law such as gravity.” As she reported this story, Robin Mead, CNN Headline News host, asked the best question: “Who made gravity?”

It seems to me that Dr. Hawking is making a faith statement of his own. He certainly cannot prove that nothing comes from nothing because of gravity. That is purely his statement of his belief. And we can be grateful that he is not saying, “Those who believe in God as the Creator should give up their faith.”

So we will go on trusting in God as revealed to us in Jesus as our Creator and Savior and friend. We will allow any theoretical physicist who wants to believe in the creative power of gravity to have his or her faith. It is sad though. Dr. Hawking is missing out on the hope we have in God the Creator who “has a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). We will celebrate our faith in Christ who, as Paul says in Colossians 1:15-16 “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible”. . . , things like gravity.

Membership Covenant

People who complete the new member class, “New Hope 101,” and decide they want to join our church are asked to sign the covenant that you see below. These are promises we are asking our members to make to God and to each other for the sake of our church’s spiritual health.

Having received Christ as my Savior and Lord and having been baptized and being in agreement with New Hope’s statements, strategy, and structure, I now feel led by the Holy Spirit to unite with the New Hope Baptist Church family. In doing so, I commit myself to God and to the other members to do the following.

1. I will protect the unity of my church.

· I will act in love toward other members.

· I will refuse to gossip.

· I will follow the leaders.

2. I will share the responsibility of my church.

· I will pray for its growth.

· I will build relationships with unbelievers and invite them to attend.

· I will warmly welcome those who visit.

3. I will serve the ministry of my church.

· I will discover my gifts.

· I will be equipped to serve by my pastors.

· I will develop a servant’s heart.

4. I will support the testimony of my church.

· I will attend faithfully.

· I will live a godly life.

· I will give regularly and proportionately from my income.

I believe that if we can all make and keep these promises to God and each other, we will grow. Healthy churches grow.

Our Financial Future

At our Church Business Meeting on August 4, Church Council Chairman Bill Batchelor reported that the loan modification and line of credit that had been recommended by the Church Council and approved by the church was completed with the bank on July 15. We paid down our mortgage from $120,000 to $70,000 using the $21,000 we raised in our Pay Down the Mortgage Campaign and $29,000 from savings. As a result, our monthly mortgage payment has gone from $3,000 down to $926.26.

We secured a line of credit with the bank in the amount of $25,000. We will, of course, only draw on it in case of an emergency.

Here is our great hope: Now that our mortgage payments are greatly reduced we will be able to pay our bills each month without ever having to withdraw any money from our savings account. Please keep your tithes and offerings flowing. We depend on your faithful giving to be able to get our ministry done. As we all give to God regularly and proportionately of our income, we will be able to accelerate our payments on our loan and pay it off early.

Fleda and I give a tenth of our income to God through New Hope. That is our long-standing commitment. We want New Hope to be a strong church with a bright future.

God blesses the investments we make in his work. As that great church starter Paul wrote to the churches in Corinth, “Those who sow sparingly will reap sparingly. Those who sow generously will reap generously.” Trust those words of the Bible. Give as God has blessed you. Give a tenth of your income and trust God to make our church grow strong in getting the message of Christ into people’s hearts.

May God make us a healthy, growing church.